A Marine Biologist
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Years ago, Jessica, pete got a phone call from a shark scientist. He knew he'd found something interesting.

He was like, hey, we just had a dead matter. Wa, or someone told IT to shore. Actually, like, I thought you should know we're about to like cut .

IT up for samples. Jessica is a marine biologist. SHE studies manta is off the coasts of florida, and he knew this was a .

very rare find because their negatively point ant. So if they stop swimming, they sink. So if they're to die offshore, they sink. And they are made of Caroline, so they decompose really rapidly.

And Jessica had been looking for an intact, dead montori. SHE had a colleague who was trying to prove that the manta is in the western atlantic, where a new species without the body IT would be a lot harder to prove.

And I was like, wait, wait, wait. Please, please don't cut into IT. I was like, just let me get there. So I was on the boat when I got the call. So I took me like two hours to get down there of them, like sitting and watching the stead manta.

So I get there and convince them to like, please, let's not cut into IT, let's just take measurements and photos. So we do all that. And then we finally find a place that we can keep the dead manta, which is basically in a freezer where they stored dead whales. So my partner was out of the country at the time, so I had my intern go steal his truck, and we put this dead mattera in the back of his pickup truck and drove two hours down ninety five .

to the whale freezer.

to the whale freezer. We had to stopping IT gas at one point, and we just lopped this like gigantic pool of blood behind us. And I was, people learn me wondering what happened at the gas station.

And eventually we got IT to the whale freezer at like nine pm that my intern both had like matt a blood and our hair and we've been like wet bathing suits all day long. But we were so glad to get in there. And I was like, oh, we'll just keep IT there for, you know, like a couple weeks so I figure out where it's going to go.

Six months later they called me and they're like, just, could you gotta move this mattera out of your freezer? So we did. And IT now lives in this Masoni, an museum to be used as tight material to describe the new species.

I'm dan heath, and this is what it's like to be. In every episode, the show, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a nurse, a lifeguard, a piano teacher. We want to know about the highs and lows of their work, what makes IT meaningful to them today, we'll ask jusici paint what it's like to be a marine biologist, will talk about what is like to swim with manta ys, why people romanticize marine biology and how using drones change to work. Stay with us.

Hey, i'm a cricket host of a podcast called the economics of everyday things. Each week we zero in on one thing and ask, what's the deal with that? Things like use soaps, the song my shona, or weirder yet, how many times you get to meet .

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of everyday things. It's from the economics radio network. I want to make sure i'm tuned into what a mental ray is because I think when i'm picturing in my head is actually a stingray or a stingray and mental raise, connected, related.

So this is the very first slide of every powerpoint presentation. Again, is the difference between a man, terri and a stingray because i'll get people of being like a mattera is what killed Stever win and i'm like, no, no, no, no, no. They're very different animals while, yes, they are related, they are both rates.

They both have a skeleton that's made of cartilage, so that's the same material that on the tipper, your nose, if you press IT. But stingrays live in the sand. They're living on the bottom.

They have a stinging barb that they can use when predators try to attack from above them. But matter raise, they're swimming all the time, so they're out swimming in the water. They have to keep swimming in order to breathe, and they also have no stinging barb. They don't have a way that they can hurt you.

And check this out, mentors tes are born measuring six feet across.

Yeah, even the ones that are eight to ten feet are still juveniles. And the adults are getting over twenty feet across. They can, big twenty .

feet across. wow.

Think about the room near in and think about if a matter I would fit in my.

So paint us a picture of the manta. I mean, you told us how enormous they are. What what are their other distinctive characteristics?

They have kind of a diamond shape body in there, all black on top theyll have some little like White pattern on top, but mostly all black um and they have two fins coming out of the front of their face, which are called sopha lic fins. And it's why, like historically, they were called devil race or devil fish like you can go back to the newspapers from the one thousand nine twenty that would be like devil fish. So they're really terrified of them. But this because they .

kind of look like horns. What sort of I mean, this is probably the right, the wrong way to phrase this. But what sort of personalities do they have?

No, I mean, that's a great question. And that's that's one reason matter are very popular with scuba divers is because they can be quite curious. They're known to come and like inspect divers and see what's going on.

The very first time I gotten the water with a man, teri um I convinced a friend to take me on their boat and try to find one, and we did. And what this matter I did to me was IT flip its body upside down so that I was swimming upside down and just covered below me for five minutes, just looking me in the eye. Ww, I have since had these encounters like that, like many times, but I just had no idea that anything like that was possible. And IT sounds cheesy to say this, but like, I fell in love there, and I was like, wow, these are the animals I want to be working with.

Yet that curiosity has gotta be uncommon for sea creatures no I mean, to kind of hang around and inspect you for five minutes, that's a prising .

yeah um so one of my favorite facts about matters is they have the largest brain of any fish and they don't just have a big brain because, you know, they're a giant creature. If you look at their cousin, the whale shark, which is the biggest fish in the sea, there are ten times the size of mattera, but they have a third of the brain size. So we think mentors are really intelligent.

There was another day when jesica felt that same central connection to a man, terray IT was one who had gotten tangled up in a fishing line.

SHE had this fishing line wrapped all around her body. And SHE just let me dive down multiple times for like thirty minutes and cut off all this line around her and it's one of these interactions where it's kind of hard to explain because, yeah, he just swam and so slow circles below me, like SHE, could have easily swim away if he wanted. And so I did seem like he was choosing to be there.

And then when I was done, SHE kinda swim away. So I don't know how to explain that interaction scientifically, but there do seem to be some of these like amazing interactions where they seem to facilitate the encounter. M.

it's striking what you said about them having the biggest brains of any fish. How do we not know more about the species given that.

I mean, people asking this question all the time, I think it's just because they're expensive to study. You know, IT requires a lot of boat hours. And like at least here in florida, you know, I have to put a lot of time into finding them.

I've gotten a lot Better at IT over time. But when I first started out, I mean, the first survey we ever did, I found two monitoring, and then we went a muck without seeing one. So, you know, IT was hard to learn about them and figure out how to study them.

Have you gotten to know individual mentoring like giving them names and support?

Yes, for sure. And what kind of sad for me is, since we work in this nursery habitat with, we're starting to see a pattern where we see the same individuals for about two to three years, maybe four years, if we're lucky, and then they they leave, which is really sad for me because I get really attached to some of these materials. Two of our favourites from the past two years are named lizard and cricket.

Both of these mansos have been hit by books. Both have been entangled in fishing line. Cricket is missing. She's missing so much of her body. She's missing like half of her wing tip on one side.

Oh, my god, but I almost cried when I saw them this year, and we've only seen them once this year and they were together, but they didn't have any new injuries. I was so happy to see them looking healthy, and I don't know if i'll see them again this year. That could be the last time I see them until I figure out where their adult habitats are. Then maybe I find them again.

So give us a slice of life, like what did you do at work today?

So I started my day today in a small single engine plane. Um we do erie surveys looking for matter rates twice a month. So we did our eri's survey and I saw some mentor's but I was too rough to go out on the boat. So me and my partner took the drone to the beach and he drown for the matter is, while I swam a hundred yard off shore, and like four foot seas to copy the matter. Ray.

oh, wait, so so you saw from the air and then and then later you you ve landed, got on the beach and I went back to where you'd seen them yes.

wow. And what are .

you trying to accomplish once you've found them?

So each matter has a unique spot pattern on its belly. So it's just like a fingerprint for humans. So if we get a photo of that spot pattern on their belly, we know which individual materials. And so that's a big part of our research is seeing which individuals are in this area.

So you're trying to kind of compile a portrait of the mineral community .

yeah exactly how many .

are there in the community that you're studying? Or do you have a .

sense of that? So we've been doing this project for about eight years. And in on the southeast coast of florida, we have about two hundred individuals in our database, OK. And what's cool about self ford a is that we're seeing only baby matter rays or juvenile mattera. Ys, so we think this is a nursery habitat where they can spend some time as babies, and then before they grow up and go off to their adult habitats.

OK, that's part of what you're going na learn, is do they migrate to these other locations as they age?

Yes, exactly. And where are the mattera is giving birth? No one has ever seen a matter give birth in the wild, so we have no idea where that happens. Yes.

wow. And and so would that be sort of like a holy grail for your research as if you manage to find that and study IT?

I mean, absolutely. I mean, I kind of think if I ever figured that out, I might just retire and not tell anyone about IT and just keep in my secret.

Hey, folks, dan, here, I was looking at the download numbers for the show, and I came across something that shocked me a little. The episode with the lowest number of downloads is actually our first episode, the stadium beer vender.

Now I guess in one way, that makes sense because with each episode, we've picked up more, more, less than or so maybe, of course, the first one would be lower, but here's why that's a problem because that episode is my all time favorite. And same for matt bird. The shows producer is his, so if you like the show, let me beg you to go back and listen to that one.

I promise you're gna like IT IT will surprise you. And in the meantime, let's get back to marine biology. So let me back up a step, because I know manto raise are your specialty, of course, but how did you get there? what? What was the first time you saw a man? terray?

So I got started in marine biology. I graduated from the university of north CarOlina with my undergraduate degree. And then I moved down to florida to work on sea turtle nesting beaches.

And so what working on the nesting beach involves is getting up at sunrise and riding up and down the atv on the beach. And you're counting tracks from the turtles because the moms crawl up on the beach and lay the eggs in the sand. So you're collecting all the data from the nesting turtles that laid their eggs the previous night.

So I be out on the beach all day, every day. And I started to notice that every now, then I would look over and I would see a mattera swimming by, and like, three feet of water. And I was just amazed like these are animals that people fly halfway across the world to go school by diving with. Then IT seems they were in florida, a waters, but no one knew anything about them.

And in my right, that mentors are an endangered species.

Yes, sir, listed endangered globally. So mentors have what we consider a very conservative life history. So I like to say that they have a reproductive strategy more like us than they do, like a tuna, like a fish.

It's gona spain, a billion eggs. Mentors are more like us and that they have a long gestation. They are pregnant for an entire year and they produce one large offspring.

And then they'll take a couple years off between producing each offspring because it's very energetically expensive for them to do so. So they're putting all their eggs into these like really big baby mantas. Um and so what that means, if there's any pressures to their population, they do not recover very quickly. So they can be fished out quite quickly from places.

Is there a conservation angle to your work? Come in part of what you do, it's clear, is just the pure science of learning for learning sake. But IT also seems like at a certain point you would feel some degree of protection to, or advocacy for the manta SE.

absolutely. And I think this is something that has changed in science over time. But as the situation in the world, uh, gets worse environmentally, I think scientists have to become conservation advocates just because we're kind of documenting all these things going wrong and you can't just sit by and do nothing about IT.

I asked her if I was hard to keep her spirits up, given the threats mantas are facing.

I mean, it's tough. Sometimes I have a tough time maintaining a positive attitude with what we see in the ocean and with climate change. In sometimes IT doesn't feel very hopeful at all, but what helps me is to look to older mentors and scientists um like especially like jane good all I feel every time i'm having a bad day, I just think about watching good all is doing and SHE is out there eighty years old he travels like two hundred days out of the year speaking you know to get people interested in conservation and spread the world that she's put her whole life into IT and i'm like if jane could all can do this and so can you and just take IT one day at a time and do what you can do?

Jessica said that the biggest threats to monterrey are getting entangled by nats being hit by boats and more than anything, fishing. Sometimes they are killed intentionally, their gills surprised in traditional chinese medicine. In other times, they are caught accidentally by Fishermen catching other things like shrimp. I asked her if there were potential solutions to that last direct.

We only really recently identified this problem in the last year, too. So we're still working on solutions. And one of the thing is we have to collect enough data to figure out where the mentors are to like make informed management practices.

So one of the things the federal government has hired us to do is to go to the mouth of the mississippi. And tag meta is which, if you ever asked me, like where I thought I be doing manta research, the mouth of the mississippi river was a place I had on my bingo card. It's very markey we have to like, stop working for because the matter is will be in the big shipping lanes. It's a crazy place to work.

And how how do you tag manta?

We use a pole sphere and put a little plastic dark into their dorsal musculature.

And the tag, what does IT communicate with?

There is a couple of different kinds of tags. One satellite tag will give you data in real time. But to give you data in real time, the tag has to break the surface.

We haven't had a lot of love with those tags on manta rays. So the other kinds attacks stay on the matter as for six months, then they pop off after six months and then send all their data to the satellite. And those are the tags we typically use.

Oh, wow, I had no idea such a thing existed. What makes IT pop off after six months?

There's a credible pin on there. So you, the pen is a program to code in six months.

And so after six months, IT IT flows to the surface, sends its information, and the information is all of the places the man array has banned in the .

intervening half year, up with the location, the temperature and depth that they dive.

That is totally fascinating.

Yeah, it's great when IT works well. It's not without technological issues.

Speaking of technology, two of the key tools that Jessica users are a boat and a drone, and both of them are subject to the wings of the weather.

My whole life is weather dependent, so I don't make plans a weak advance more more than a weaken advance, because I don't know if the weather is going to be .

what are the right conditions for study is just obvious stuff like no storms or are there more subber things you have to watch for?

Any storms are a problem, but it's more about the wind in the sea state and it's being too rough out there to fly the drone and Operate the boat. Then you know, storms usually built fly past where we can avoid them. So it's more about the sea state and being able to get out there. And this time a year, we can never hurricane come through and that can keep us off the water for a month. So i'm interested .

in the drone aspect of the work. I imagine that relatively new to the field, how how do you use drones in the word?

yeah. So we did not use drones in the beginning of our project, and now we use them almost exclusively to locate matter is. So we fly them from the boat.

We catch them in our hands on the boat. We use them for everything. I wrote a whole scientific paper just about behaviour observed from a drone of mentors.

I bet that helped so much just to turn IT lesson to a needed in a hasta kind of thing.

Oh, absolutely. And then it's also like less invasive says to get footage in the water you're having to get close enough toward that matter, can see you to get footage of bit. But from the drown, you're able to film natural behavior like what when no one is in the water. So I mean, the things i've been able to see from IT are absolutely amazing. I'm obsess with that.

Do most marine biologist pick a particular organism to specialize with, like the way you've adel dental manta raise is how I works.

You absolutely don't have to. Um some people definitely do because people will ask me what I studied and i'm like i'm studying everything about the mantas just because we're trying to learn as much as we can um but says someone could be like a reproduction biologist are in study the reproductive biology of sharks so IT doesn't matter which species of shark, but theyll just look at how different sharks reproduce and compare those.

So you definitely don't have to study just one taxi and i've already spread out to studying another race species called guitar fish, which i've become a little obsessed with as well. What's a guitar fish? Uh, there these adorable little race species, they kind of look like sharks because they have two fins on their back, but they have these little triangle spade heads in the ones that we see about a foot half long.

But I got interested in them because I was circling on the little reef by my house just for kind of exercise. And I started seeing guar fish, and I just started collecting data. And now we have four hundred guitarfish encounters in our data face, and we have started have three great students working on projects. So these little things, or i'm like, hum, just going to see what's going on and they kind of bloat into something else.

And so something like that where you have this kind of lucky encounter and then you start formulating research questions. What happens after that? Like what's the process of forming those questions into a study that staff and funded .

and so forth. So yeah till like start a project on something new is you're going to a formulate scientific questions um but before you do that, you also need to see what research is already out there. And so for example, with these guitar AR fish, I saw that there was literally only like two papers published on the species and they were from fifteen years ago.

So then I find that we have a species that we know very little about, but we know that it's um in danger of extinction. So you go and apply for grants to study that and you know you show like, hey, there is a species that we don't really know anything about. I know how to find them and study them and can answer some these questions that will keep these species from being data efficient.

And so part of your job is to raise the money needed to address these questions.

Absolutely is my least favourite part of the job. I don't like IT.

I mean, what is involved with that is that is that writing grants labori ously. Are you making presentations? Or how is a word yeah?

I mean, grants is the way we are. fine. Most of our research activities. But like our larger nonprofit, you know it's something like a lot of the grants you know you have to use those money is for very specific purposes. No, I use these money to buy these tags in this boat fuel. So it's helpful if you can get money from private donors or from the corporate arena that give you more money to be like, hey, you can use this money how you see fit to run your organization.

So you identify a question of interest, you you raise some money. And then what's the next step after that you sort of form a project team and .

staff at um staff at that kind of funny my team here in floris so small you you turn .

to the two people next to you and say, hey, will you help me with this guitar .

fish thing yeah I mean one of my major problems is that I have more ideas than I can physically accomplish myself so with the guitar fish I turned to a collaborator at the university miami and he had some very qualified great students are now working on some of these projects um which is a great way to get some like shorter term research projects done because grade students have to do something for their thesis in order to graduate and these make uh great projects for .

them to .

get done and they worked cheap yes.

their best qualification.

I was once a grad student myself.

You put your time and yeah, it's fair, the cycle of life. So I wanted to run this one thing by you. I feel like marine biology as a profession just has this kind of halo of romanticism around IT that I don't totally understand.

Like my theory is that if you went to high school students and had them real off all the professions they could name, I think they would probably name about twenty and and one of them would be in biology, even though it's probably like point zero zero two percent of the world's jobs or something. Do you agree with that? And if so, how did marine biology come to have this kind of reference attach to IT?

Hm, that's an interesting question. I do agree that that's what most people would say, because every time I tell someone i'm a marine biologist, I would say fifty percent of people say that's what I wanted to do when I was a kid, or that's what I wanted to do in college. Yes, you always hear that. I don't know if it's maybe like pop culture or movies kind of like romanticizing, the marine biologists, which is kind of funny because I wasn't one of those people. I had no idea what I wanted to do.

I mean, you would think you would be zoo logic or something, you know, with people just liking cheers and giraffe and lions. IT is just interesting to me that it's marine biologist. This seems to have this special hold on us.

Well, infer me. What got me interested in IT was seeing free Willy was me that captivated and me as a child. I wanted to be an orkid rainer or, and I was Younger because I saw free William really, you know, just wanted to, like, interact with a whale every day would be amazing.

Yeah, I I wonder if that's what's underneath. Like, I wonder if when people think marine biology, they think i'm gna be swimming with dolphins and wales.

I think that's probably a big part of IT, which um like it's illegal to swim with orphans and whales in the united states. So is IT to be able to do that? yes. Oh.

I thought they were like theme parks where they would charge you to do that.

There are some that were grandfathered in. Um the marine memo protection act is from the seventies and so some of those parks got kind of grandfather in. But like in the wild, you are not allowed to have tours where you can go on with them.

So just go with in our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is the most insulting thing you could say about a marine biologist work?

I don't know. One of the things in conservation scientist that you can say that's pretty insulting is to accuse someone of being a parachute scientist oh which is a term that come around fairly recently um which refers to someone you know typically someone from the developed world who you know pops into a developing country said, you know i'm just gonna study the shark species for a week but not include any local scientist or talk to the community or do anything like that which has become more more found upon in science which is a good thing so that people aren't just do you know going into other communities and being and like this is what you should be doing without, you know, consulting the people who live there.

What's a tool specific dear profession that you really like using?

I mean the drone is the first thing I would say because I use IT every day and I feel like it's problem, my most useful tool. Um but the other thing could absolutely be my free diving fins, which are these really long finds that helpme swim fast and they are always in my car because you never know when I might need to go straight to the ocean.

I'd love that. I just love the image you got got your fins in the car.

I've definitely gone swimming for mantis in gene shorts and a Normal shirt with my friends. Ask on had.

have an emergency .

swim yeah.

What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

I think one of my favorites is just the sound of the reef. S jack coste wrote. One of his first books was called the silent world about like the ocean being silent.

But it's actually quite like a noisy environment of all the like. Fish eating, log off the coral or shrimp s popping their little clause. So you hear all these just like little background noises and like when we're doing our guar fish, stork's is just a very relaxing sound to me.

What is an aspect of your job that you consistently saver? Oh, man.

just being in the water. I was thinking about IT today while I was waiting for the matter to swim, buying, you know, I was out in really rough seas, but just being in the water, like a scientifically shown, like lower your blood pusher, call you, and you feel so much Better being out in the ocean.

Who is the best known marine biologist? Would you say .

best marine biologist? IT is probably, at least in our community, is soviet. Earl SHE was the first woman that headed the national oceanic and atmosphere ic administration. She's known as her deepness because he has gone in some marines down to the depth of the oceans. And SHE just in overall that.

as that is the best nickname i've ever heard. Heard deepness.

yeah. no. And he is still eight years old, and out there pounding the pavement all the time to make conservation efforts keep going. So, you know, I look at women like them and you know, they really just like, show me the path, ford, like, you just got to keep trying.

Jessica pete is a marine biologist who studies mantor raise in florida. I was struck by her story about how early in her career, she's coming the beaches for turtle tracks. And SHE happens to notice manta is in the ocean.

So SHE gets interested, has that experience where one of them seem to swim with her and boom, she's in IT for other people that day swimming the manta. I might have been a fun story to tell you, a cocktail party, but for jesica, it's different. SHE organizes research.

He raises the funds. SHE makes stuff happen. There can be a big gap between inspiration and action.

We've probably all got friends who are dreamers full of new inspirations, but never able to translate them into action. Jessica is great at closing that gap. Somebody calls and says we got a dead man terray bom.

She's on IT, drops everything, gets IT to the whale freezer. She's diving one day and spots a guitar, a fish, pokes around on the research, discovers its understudy and boom, activate some studies, inspiration to action. A few episodes back, I was commenting on the life insurance salesman's secret weapon, his discipline.

How would we talk about what Jessica is doing here? Some kind of scrappiness activation energy. Some jobs are so structure that you don't need much of that quality.

But for the sica is foundational, turning curiosity into scientific research, learning to drive a boat, fly drone, applying for grants and forming a bond with an endangered species. Folks, that's what is like to be a marine biologist. This show was produced by map party. I'm dann heath. Take care.